Page load time is a very important SEO factor that many new webmasters overlook. It can affect your PPC quality score, your search rank, your PageRank, and ultimately how much traffic you get to your site, which affects your conversions and your ROI. That’s pretty important, right?

I highly recommend that you test your page load time every now and then. I recently found a good tool that lets you do that. It’s a pretty useful tool that I found easy and simple to use and I went to SEO Chat to compare their tool, but I found out that they don’t have a page load time analyzer. Instead, they have a code-to-text ratio tester, which is useful also, but not the same thing. In fact, your code-to-text ratio does affect your load time, but that’s not all that affects it.

Other things that can affect your page load time include:

• Big files like Flash and multimedia files
• Lots of graphic images
• Image backgrounds
• Javascript code
• An abundance of CSS files
• Slow server

Many of the items that increase your page load time can be placed in external files on your server and referenced in your HTML. It would do your site good to have it tested for page load time and get your weaknesses fixed.

I can’t believe an article in SEO News actually recommends these three strategies:

• Hire a blog reviewer
• Write articles
• Use a link triangle

The only one of these strategies is even valid any more is article writing. Hiring a blog reviewer is only half valid, but only if you do it the right way. HINT: Going through a service like Pay Per Post is not the right way.

Google, just last year, killed the three-way linking strategy at the same time they started penalizing website networks. You can still get away with it for a short time, but you’ll eventually be reported by your competition and the link juice will be retracted. Why bother?

Google has also penalized websites that use services like Pay Per Post. And if you advertise on your blog that you are a Pay Per Post reviewer, you can really expect to be penalized. So what’s the right way? Do it discreetly. A few clues:

1. Don’t advertise on your properties that you provide blog reviews
2. Operate in full disclosure; let your readers know it’s a paid review and be honest about your opinions
3. Don’t sell link juice as a part of your review; use the nofollow tag and make the primary benefit of the review a mention by name on your blog and access to your traffic

Selling review space is OK as long as you do it honestly and ethically. Trying to trick the search engines or selling links isn’t going to help you or the websites you review. If you are thinking of buying a review for links, do not advertise that you’ve done it and only use reviewers who don’t advertise the fact that they do it. Otherwise, you’ll never see the link benefit you are buying or, if you do, it won’t last long.

You’re much better writing articles and marketing them for links. It’s legitimate, recognized, and effective.

Duncan Morris at SEOmoz gives a pretty good discussion on the pros and cons of sitemapping your website. Here’s the lowdown on the nitty gritty from a business perspective:

Competitive intelligence. If you are telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will be of interest to your competitors. I know of no way of protecting your sitemap so only the search engines can access it.

How much do you want your competitors to know about you? Anything you let Google know will also be known by your competition. Do you really want to disclose information like the priority of each of your web pages?

I think Duncan’s list of cons is a lot more interesting than his list of pros. Perhaps the most compelling argument against sitemaps is the architecture argument. A sitemap will hide any crawlability issues you have by making inaccessible links accessible to the search engines. If you have a problem then you likely will never know about it. So your XML sitemap may actually be a bandaid for a problem than needs surgery. Personally, I think if you have a small website then you don’t need an XML sitemap. If you have a large website then I like Duncan’s advice: Work out all of your crawlability issues first then once you are satisfied with where your site it at, add a sitemap if you want one. Most websites probably don’t need them.

When you perform SEO for your website, are you targeting a particular search engine or do you just do general SEO and see what happens? Either way is fine, I guess, but it’s nice to know what the search engines look for. It appears to me that if you want to rank highly in Google and stay there then you need a strong back link plan. With MSN Live, you can do much better with lean HTML code and strong meta tags. MSN Live seems to be happier with tables than CSS. Yahoo! is somewhere in between Google and MSN; meta tags are much less important, back links are somewhat important, and CSS seems to be favored. Have you noticed any of this?

Some people are under the impression that you can’t build a solid business around search results at just one search engine, unless it’s Google. I’d like to dispel that myth. I think you can. But you have to have a specific target in mind and you have to go after your target market aggressively. You can’t just sit by and passively wait for them to come to you. Profile your target customer and reach that customer where he or she hangs out. You’ll be a lot more successful that way.

At some point you may want to change the design of your website. Google Website Optimizer can help you tremendously. The many things you can do with this one tool are incredible and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Here’s a list of the types of testing you can do through the Google Website Optimizer:

• A/B Testing - Test two different versions of a web page to see which performs better.
• Site-Wide Testing - You can change one page on your website to conduct an experiment just to see if your changes are practical for your entire website.
• Test Sections of a Web Page Across Multiple Pages - You can test sections of a web page across several pages or just test one section on one page. Google Website Optimizer makes it easier.
• Test Individual Links To Maximum Conversions - You can test individual links to see if you can improve your conversion rates.
• Test Multiple Sections of a Web Page - Just like testing individual sections, you can test multiple sections on a web page on just that one page or across multiple pages.
• Test Two Versions of a Website - Rebuild your entire website and test both versions side by side.
• Test Newsletter Subscriptions - You can also test multiple versions of your newsletter opt-in box to increase your newsletter subscriptions. You do this by testing your opt-in box in different locations on your pages and by changing its appearance.
• Test Individual Landing Pages - Test your landing pages to see which ones convert better.
• Cross-Domain Testing - You can even test conversions across domains so if your shopping cart system is on a different domain than your sales page then you can test the performance of your sales process across both domains.

There is no end to the types of testing you can do through Google Website Optimizer. The tool is designed for high performance marketing agencies who have done these types of testing off line for years. Now, small business owners have access to the same types of marketing tools that highly successful marketers have been using for years. Google Website Optimizer equals the score.

I found a great article on SiteProNews that discusses how marketers can use meta search engines to increase their customer base. The article focused on two aspects of meta search: Ranking and research.

I’ve never actually given this much thought, but it makes a lot of sense. You can do keyword research and research on your topic using the meta search engines. The author, Bill Platt, recommends two meta search engines, Dogpile and Widow.com. Dogpile is perhaps the most well known of the meta search engines, but searching Dogpile is really like searching Google, Yahoo!, and MSN and compiling the results. There are thousands of search engines out there to choose, some niche and some meta. You should expand the scope of your research to include those and not just stick to the big 3.

Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. You want to do some kind of link building on an ongoing basis. Doing so will increase your rankings and help push you nearer to the top of the search engines for your keywords. Here are 4 types of links that you should think about in your link building campaign:

• URL Link - Your website address is used as a link. Useful for driving traffic, but unless your website address is a strong brand, don’t look for a lot of SEO benefits.
• Text Links - The most common kind of link. A specific word or phrase is used as a link and points to a relevant page online. This type of link has the most SEO benefit and with the right word or phrase could help you rank very high in the search engines.
• Image Links - This is when an image links back to your website. It could be your logo, a photo, or any kind of graphic. Using image links in your link building campaign can enhance your traffic and provide SEO benefits. It can be very powerful, but you have to really think about what images you want to use.
• Dynamic Links - Dynamic links are written in some kind of code, usually Javascript. Many affiliate links are dynamic, or redirects. You have to be careful with these as the search engine could penalize you if they think that you are spamming or using techniques that go against their guidelines. Be sure you are familiar with search engine guidelines and don’t violate them. Dynamic links are not bad, you can use them, but you may not get many SEO benefits depending on how the links are created.

One way to ensure you get the kind of link back activity to your website that you want to have is to create a links page. You can call it “Links” or “Banners” or whatever you want as long as it is obvious that these are links that your users can copy and paste and use on their website. It is common to offer these tools for other websites and to invite users to provide their website as well. Link building is an essential element to running a web business today. Don’t leave it out.

Rand Fishkin has an interesting video on PageRank. In the video he does a good job of explaining the basics behind PageRank and the concepts upon which it is based. I’ll let you watch the video then I’ve got some comments on it.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Has Pagerank Changed? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

First, I like the way he’s explained the difference between internal links and external links. Obviously, external links are very important, but internal links are just as important and when you establish your internal link structure you need to consider that link juice that he is talking about - not just today’s link juice, but tomorrow’s and next year’s.

If you have PageRank of 2 right now (in actuality, whatever your measured PageRank is today is really what it was three months ago because Google only reports updates to its PageRank with that much of a time delay) then you should prepare yourself for when your website has a PageRank of 5. You should always be thinking ahead. According to Rand’s example, if you have a page that is a PageRank of 2 and you have 4 internal links with 2 outbound links then that PageRank of 2 will be divided between all of your pages as well as those external pages you are linking to. That’s not a lot of link juice going around. But what about when that page’s PageRank is at a 6?

Let’s say you want to improve the authority of certain pages on your website. What do you do? Well, there are a number of things you can do to help certain pages improve their PageRank:

• Do some external link building for that specific page
• Nofollow some links on a page to ensure that the pages you want to improve get the link juice
• Add some link bait to that page
• Take measures to improve the PageRank of the page that is linking to the page you want to improve

All of these measures are ways that you can influence the authority of specific web pages on your website. Getting back to that page with a PageRank of 2 and 4 internal links/2 external links, if you nofollow 2 of those internal links then you’ll improve the link juice that flows to all of the other links on the page. Also, if you nofollow the external links (let’s say you want to give your visitors an opportunity to visit those other websites but you want to save the link juice for yourself then you can nofollow the links so that all of your link juice flows internally).

PageRank is a measure of authority online. Already, Google is changing it and Rand’s video is timely because the future of authority is probably more important than the future of PageRank. The search engines are already looking at other ways to measure authority and my guess is that PageRank may some day become something else. Right now it is still somewhat useful, but don’t spend too much time worrying about it.

You hear a lot about link building, but which method of building links is best?

I’m not sure that there is a “best” method overall. There are several methods of link building that are effective. SEO-News recently published an article that outlined 13 of them:

• Reciprocal Links
• Purchasing Links
• Industry Websites
• Content Development
• Blog
• Social Media
• Article Syndication
• Press Releases
• Comments
• Forum Posts
• Testimonials
• Directory Submissions
• Link Bait

While I can’t say that any of these is the best way of building links, I can tell you that you should stay away from some certain practices like buying links. This generally is not helpful and it could get your site in trouble with the search engines.

You also want to stay away from link farms. If a site you are interested in linking to or from has hundreds of links on one page then you probably don’t want a link from that site.

But I would recommend the following link building practices, especially if you have a new website:

• Reciprocal linking
• Asking for links from other sites within your industry
• Focus on developing great content and you’ll get natural links
• Start a blog and other bloggers will link to you
• Use social media diligently
• Write articles and syndicate them
• Distribute press releases online
• Leave comments in forums and on other blogs
• Submit your site to website directories

This is not the complete list, but this is a good place to start on your link building campaign. Build a good site and people will link to it.

Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, recently wrote a blog post about Google’s ranking algorithms. It’s a very basic, but interesting read. In the blog post he said three things that I found to be interesting and relevant. The first of these are the three guiding principles of the Google ranking philosophy:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

That’s pretty cut and dry. That first principle is really the heart of search engine algorithms and derivatively of search marketing. All information is, in a sense, local. All information retrieval is global. But you could also just as well say the reverse. Online, the local and the global collude and obscure into one vein.

Is that good or bad? I guess it depends on your point of view, but it is reality and if you want to rank well online then you have to understand that every page you build to be crawled by the search engines has the potential to rank locally as well as globally. You hold the keys to how well or poorly it does online.

The second thing Amit said that I found interesting is this:

The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages.

In the midst of keeping it simple, the Google ranking team has decided to keep manual editing and adjustment to a minimum. That means they can’t show any favoritism. By tweaking their algorithms to address issues in the ranking structure of the Web, Google is able to fix problems at the macro level instead of the micro level. That means they can fix many websites just by addressing the issues related to one because not all of them will be reported. Understanding this is vital to understanding how to present your pages for ranking.

Finally, the third thing I found interesting is the frequency that Google makes changes to its algorithms.

We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change.

Ten ranking changes every week. That’s a lot. It’s more than one a day and it begs the question, “Does Google ever reverse itself?” I think it probably does, but you’d search hard and long to find examples of it that are provable. Nevertheless, understanding that Google is always making changes to its algorithms is essential to having a good understanding of search technology. There’s no magic pill. There are only principles. Learn them and you can succeed.